Any time designers sit down to make a genre mash-up like Fingeance, they enter exciting new territory. There’s an inherent delight to mixing new things together and watching what emerges. Two of our genres – character brawler and roguelike (random levels, random loot) – have given us a lot to think about. Hundreds of times, we’ve gotten to ask and answer “what happens when this interacts with that.” Today, I take you inside a particularly tricky issue.

Before that, here’s the short version:

• Starter parts are now about 20% weaker than they were before.
• The Cannons and Gadgets you find in the first shop will now be a significant upgrade compared to your starter parts.
• Augments are now small permanent additions.
• Augments are now quite simple, each offering a modest boost to damage, attack speed, health, energy, etc.
• In the future, Rare Augments may appear, offering more interesting effects.
• Each character now has a special Starter Augment.
  • Each Starter Augment is tuned to be powerful at all stages of the game.
  • Starter Augments are intended to be build-around parts that encourage you to develop the character in a specific direction.
  • Each Starter Augment is intended to work with several different playstyles and late-game builds.
  • Starter Augments, like other augments, cannot be removed.

 

Genre Mash-Up Mayhem

Fingeance just encountered a major growing pain, and we’re making a fairly large adjustment to the way players progress. Recently, we’ve cobbled together enough content to provide three levels of gameplay. This is a major achievement: we can now at last get a feel for how playing through a full Fingeance campaign will ultimately go. For the most part, we’re happy: players grow in power, parts grow in complexity and coolness, and potent strategies develop across the entire team. However, we’ve encountered one giant problem: our characters suck. They have great personality… but, well, that’s what you say when there’s nothing else to compliment.

So, what sucks about Fingeance characters? Persistence. Until now, as you play through Fingeance, you’ve been able to remove and replace every part of your character’s ship. While Finn might start with a Cannon, two Gadgets, and an Augment, all of these take up slots. As you play, you’ll want to upgrade your power, and upgrading your power means replacing weaker parts with stronger parts. See, the trouble is that, thus far, a Fingeance character is a loadout. Once you replace everything in the loadout, the character might as well be dead. Yes, your submarine’s color indicates you’re still technically Finn, but does that mean anything? It’s like saying sure, my wife is a zombie, but I’m still married.

 

The Genre Discussion Heats Up

In our meeting on Wednesday, I raised this issue. The conversation went something like this, with some editing to make me look smarter:

Me: We’re in danger here. We’re building a game about characters, but we’re letting players bury them under buyable parts.

Charles: What’s the problem, exactly?

Me: Well, right now, playtests show that Bubbles loses her Bubbles-ness by about level three.

Stephen: Isn’t that Fingeance, though? People pick up parts and build on the go.

Me: Totally, but Charles has been arguing from the start that this is a Comic Book styled character-driven game!

Charles: Yeah… so what’s the problem?

Me: Doesn’t it bother you that Bubbles and Dorsa – two polar opposite personalities – might as well be the same person by midway through the game?

Stephen: So what do you propose?

We’d been here before. For a while, we’d been kicking around the idea of making our characters function like those in a MOBA game. That is, their attack (Cannon) and special abilities (Gadgets) would be locked in at the start of the campaign. They’d be able to upgrade them, but unable to put wholly new parts in their place.

The conversation continued…

Me: Well, what do you think of the Augments-only idea?

Stephen: Where you can only buy Augments? Isn’t it a little against the spirit of a Roguelike?

Me: Well, it’d be about the same as Risk of Rain, and Rogue-like is totally the first genre on its Steam page.

Stephen: I still don’t like it. It takes away from our “build your own team” premise.

Charles: So what would you say the problem is?

Me: Well, characters are just a list of parts – all of which are replaceable and most of which aren’t even unique.

Stephen: Good point.

Look at Stephen being modest. Here’s the thing: he’d actually, in a really clever way, already solved this problem. He just hadn’t told us yet. Later in the meeting, this happened:

Stephen: By the way, I’m making our starter parts weaker.

Charles: Whoa, what’s the problem?

Stephen: We want the parts in the first shop to be upgrades, right?

Me: Yeah. How is that working out?

Stephen: It’s good, but I can’t make the Starter Augments weaker. If I do, that makes the character feel too weak.

Me: Oh?

Stephen: Actually, I made the Starter Augments about four times stronger.

Me: What!?

Stephen: Yeah! A lot of the characters’ personality is in those things. If they’re strong, but the starting cannons are weak, the characters still feel distinct.

Me: Wait…

Charles: …What’s the problem now?

Me: The only problem I see is Stephen being a genius. He’s making us look bad! Think about it – in Risk of Rain and most other Roguelikes, you don’t ever lose the stuff you buy. It just stays with you and you get more and more powerful. Well… What if we do the same thing with our Augments?

 

Resolution at Last

And just like that, the idea took off. For the foreseeable future, we’ve decided to divide our parts into two radically different styles. Cannons and Gadgets will work as they have so far: you’ll have three slots to fill as you choose. Augments, however, will fill the role of permanent additions to your power. Since they’re permanent, we’re choosing to start each character off with a single powerful and unique Starter Augment. Here are a few we have in the works:

 

Battleborn – Owned by Bubbles

Bubbles grows in power as long as she stays in combat. As long as Bubbles is near at least one enemy, she’ll gain attack speed and damage reduction, capping at a 50% bonus to both after 12 seconds in combat.

While outside of combat, these bonuses fade away over 5 seconds.

Sniper Scope – Owned by Gil

20% of Gil’s shots are critical hits. These deal 3x damage and also apply On-Hit effects three times.

Spine Thrasher – Owned by Spike

When Spike is hit by a bullet, he counterattacks. He’ll always fire at least two spikes whenever he’s hit, and the more damage he takes, the more he’ll shoot back.

Spike is 30% larger than other characters.

Spike starts with +50% maximum HP.

 

So there’s just a little taste of what’s in store. I hope you enjoyed this look inside Escape Industries and our problem-solving process. I look forward to showing off more Augments and character-progression goodies in the near future!